Volcan Pacaya

Today we got to hike up a volcano!! I had heard about a few students doing this in the past and I'd asked the school to organize a trip for us. I had pretty much given up on it since I hadn't heard anything about it in a while, but my teacher finally told me we were going to be heading out this week :) They needed at least six people to go and we ended up having seven (a pretty big group for a school activity). We hired a van which drove us to the trailhead. As soon as we pulled up a big group of kids ran out and tried to sell us walking sticks. I didn't think I needed one but felt bad for the kids, so I bought one (I ended up being really grateful for it.) There were also a bunch of men trying to rent horses to us ($14 bucks for there and back. Not too shabby). I politely refused though because a) I'm not so lazy that I need a horse to complete a hike and b) I'm pretty sure that I would have crushed all of their little horses. The dude reassured me that the horses were much stronger than they looked and could easily bring me up, but after refusing him thirty times he eventually gave up and moved on to other students. My friends rented one though, here's them with Muñeca (Doll)

This is us at the start of the trail. You can see how much dust was kicked up. It was like this the whole time, the whole mountain is covered in ash.

The trail was super steep in most places and the ash/sand cover made it hard to get your footing at times. That in conjunction with the high altitude (8,400 ft- compared to my second highest climb of Mt Katahdin- 5,200 ft) meant that by the time I got to the top, I was dying. I also haven't done a lot of hiking this season and I'm a bit heftier than I've been in the past, so I was definitely looking rough towards the end. It was really gorgeous though and well worth the effort. Here are some shots of the way up:

Here's the view of Volcan de Agua (the big volcano that looms over Antigua) from about half way up the trail

And in the opposite direction, the backside of the mountain that adjoins the volcano. They have a lot of antennae on here from local radio and TV stations, but apparently it's not usually a big problem because when the volcano explodes, it goes straight down and doesn't affect this stuff.

And when we finally got around that mountain, there was the volcano! You can see a bit of smoke coming out of it

After a while we started getting to areas that had been wiped out by the last eruption (May 2010). It was a little surreal to be standing on dried up lava! The colors signify the different elements in the lava, yellow for sulfer and red for magnesium.

It was hard to get a decent picture, but there were really awesome swirls where the lava had flowed down and then dried up.

Here's what the trail was looking like at this point

This is the view of Volcan de Agua from the top of Volcan Pacaya. Look how black the soil is!

Proof that I didn't just pay the horse dudes to ride up and take some pics for me

Here are four of our teachers. The first one is Nanci (my morning teacher) and the third one is Hugo (my afternoon teacher).

And here's a group shot. Yes, there were even stray dogs up on the volcano

There was also this really cool cave up there. It was so warm inside because of all the lava flowing underground. When the lava is really flowing people use this cave as a sauna

And then we headed back. Going down was much easier, especially with all of the sand. We basically just had to gracefully fall down the mountain.

Sadly, the volcano wasn't active enough for us to roast marshmallows over open lava pits as I'd hoped. I'm definitely going to try to head back another day before I leave Guatemala (as soon as I forget what a hard hike it was)